Online education is growing because of its benefits and advantages that students enjoy. Educational technologies (e.g., learning analytics, student modelling, and intelligent tutoring systems) bring great potential to online education. Many online courses, particularly in self-paced online learning (SPOL), face some inherent barriers such as…

This paper presents the best practices used by institutional review boards (IRBs) and human research protections programs (HRPPs) to prepare online graduate student investigators for human research protections specific to research within online graduate degree programs or where research supervisors are not proximal to graduate student…

In massive open online courses (MOOCs), learners can interact with each other using discussion boards. Automatically inferring the states or needs of learners from their posts is of interest to instructors, who are faced with a high attrition in MOOCs. Machine learning has previously been successfully used to identify states such as confusion or…

With the development of information technology and the advent of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) and Small Private Online Course (SPOC), various online courses which include a lot of new resources and new teaching methods have appeared. The application of advanced teaching resources and educational concepts can improve students' learning…

The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) is required by RCW 28A.250.040 to report annually on online learning. This report uses data extracted from the Comprehensive Education Data and Research System (CEDARS). Key findings from the 2022-2023 school year include: (1) More students accessed online courses and more schools and…

According to a continuously increasing amount of information in all aspects whether the sources are retrieved from an internal or external organization, a platform should be provided for the automation of whole processes in the collection, storage, and processing of Big Data. The tool for creating Big Data is a Big Data challenge. Furthermore, the…

Open Education (OE), a generic term for a collection of practices that seek to broaden the access to education through digital means, has gained increasing traction and popularity over the last years and from various corners, both globally and in European circles. Rather than taking the technologies OE makes use of at face value, this article…

This paper addresses the question of identifying a concept dependency graph for a MOOC through unsupervised analysis of lecture transcripts. The problem is important: extracting a concept graph is the first step in helping students with varying preparation to understand course material. The problem is challenging: instructors are unaware of the…

The pandemic was, in some ways, a sneak preview of higher education's future, one in which technology-mediated and -enabled education is ubiquitous, but with the potential for deep inequities in access to high-quality learning. This report describes some of the ways in which higher education succeeded and fell short during the remarkable 2020-21…

Personalization is crucial for achieving smart learning environments in different lifelong learning contexts. There is a need to shift from one-size-fits-all systems to personalized learning environments that give control to the learners. Recently, learning analytics (LA) is opening up new opportunities for promoting personalization by providing…

Schools face enormous challenges regarding how to operate efficiently and safely for the 2020-21 school year. As part of that response, some state leaders are asking the U.S. Department of Education to waive the annual federal testing and accountability requirements for 2021, which are key to understanding and addressing gaps in education among…

The article deals with the interplay between learning analytics and massive open online courses (MOOCs) and provides a conceptual framework to situate ongoing research in the MOOC and learning analytics innovation cycle (MOLAC framework). The MOLAC framework is organized on three levels: On the micro-level, the data collection and analytics…

The end of the school year is approaching in most countries of the EU neighbourhood and Central Asia. Most countries closed schools and all forms of face-to-face education and training in mid-March/early April 2020. As the crisis progresses, a stable picture is emerging. Countries have passed through similar stages since the outbreak: being…

Individual teachers, administrators, and parents made tremendous efforts to continue educating the Commonwealth's children between March and June of this year. But no amount of dedicated individual effort could have overcome fundamental challenges: weak guidance to districts from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) against…

The initial vision for intelligent tutoring systems involved powerful, multi-faceted systems that would leverage rich models of students and pedagogies to create complex learning interactions. But the intelligent tutoring systems used at scale today are much simpler. In this article, I present hypotheses on the factors underlying this development,…